Colin Marshall

Fantacrap

Humorist/curmudgeon Joe Queenan is, to me, a polar figure: with any given piece, he makes me either pitch over in one-liner-induced hysterics or cringe at threadbare premises stretched too far. (Sometimes his curmudgeonry feels forced, but, at 57, he's still a tad young for that routine.) While I took A.J. Jacobs' side, just barely, in the Know-it-All feud (1, 2), I keep returning to check out what Queenan's been up to.

Most recently, he wrote up John Perkins' The Secret History of the American Empire in the New York Times Book Review. Perkins, to jog your memory, was the guy who wrote the paranoid bestseller Confessions of an Economic Hitman, to quote Jay Sherman, a mixture of fantasy and crap. ("I call it fantacrap!") Sarcasm at full tilt, Queenan's review of Perkins' new diatribe provides the funniest sentence I've read in at least the past six months:

Because so many of the anecdotes and even the general outline of Perkins’s conspiracy theories date from the ’60s, a better title might have been “Rip Van Winkle Versus the Trilateral Commission.”

Read the whole thing, but here's one more excerpt to whet the appetite:

The author also has a tendency to play fast and loose with the facts, skating over Castro’s myriad crimes in Cuba and Mao’s festive homicide in China. He is weak on American history, somehow confusing the monstrously inhospitable Iroquois tribes with the Little Sisters of the Poor. He describes Che Guevara’s death in ludicrously dramatic terms, when in fact this trendsetter, fashion plate and full-service psychopath came to a clownish end. He seems to believe that the C.I.A., having murdered the democratically elected presidents of Chile and Ecuador, then put Linda Tripp on the payroll in a plot to destroy Bill Clinton — and frankly, this sounds a bit far-fetched. He suggests that the first President Bush invaded Panama because Manuel Noriega had incriminating photos of George W. Bush snorting cocaine and engaging in kinky sex. If only history were this much fun!

Adam Gopnik, Through the Children's Gate

Adam Gopnik’s fans have endured an awful dry spell since 2000, when the longtime New Yorker essayist’s previous collection, Paris to the Moon, saw publication. His polished, observant prose made the recounted experience of living and raising a child in what is quite possibly the world’s most romanticized city resonant and even recognizable. Having spent the subsequent half-decade in New York, quite possibly the world’s second-most romanticized city, he’s put out a spiritual sequel – a new backdrop, a new character in the form of a small daughter – in Through the Children’s Gate.

As so many parents of students abroad discover, extended stays in France have long-term effects on the visitor, not all of them unequivocally positive. Gopnik’s penchant for building grand questions – and, occasionally, their answers – out of the rarely-examined stuff of everyday life, already humming along in his last project, hits top gear in his newest. Taking a cue from his continental colleagues, he’s enthusiastically embraced a host of shopworn devices: the startling contradiction, the majestic juxtaposition, the epic inference. This is not always to the good – the sociological blustering pioneered by genuinely French commentators is, disappointingly, not entirely absent – but, tempered by Gopnik’s characteristic restraint and uncertainty, it makes for a fascinating verbal lens through which to view existence in New York.

Indeed, if the well-traveled, Canadian-born Gopnik has a stylistic angle, it’s that of a uniquely international perspective on things uniquely New York. This might sound tiring, and sometimes it is, for instance when the author stretches four Thanksgiving pieces into increasingly desperate attempts to squeeze overarching meaning from events. Speculation about what might have been laid bare by the public’s reaction to September 11^th feels obligatory. Ambitious meandering constitutes, luckily for the reader, the exception rather than the rule: moment after well-placed moment, rich reflection after unexpected truth attest that Gopnik really is good enough to pull off a new exploration of familiar ground.

At their best, the essays comment simultaneously upon the vagaries of parenthood and New York residence, all the while extrapolating to the universal human experience. Gopnik’s years with an eccentric octogenarian analyst make a fine slice of humor, but the recollection functions equally well as rumination on how life itself should be approached. Make no mistake, it takes real skill to build anything out of the ramblings of an old Freudian whose ultimate piece of advice is the suggestion that “life has many worthwhile aspects,” and Gopnik possesses it. Equally engaging are his thoughts and his transcription of others’ thoughts on the nature of learning, teaching and expertise, the best of which come in “Last of the Metrozoids”, a masterful account of art historian Kirk Varnedoe’s final months spent coaching young Luke Gopnik’s team of eight-year-old football players.

Luke’s presence – an older and, in a certain precocious pre-adolescent way, wiser one – remains nearly as important as in Paris to the Moon, helping to put Dad into perspective whenever a bout of convoluted contemplation entangles the elder Gopnik. Olivia, the young daughter, gets cast as a sort of lifestyle mirror, reflecting the supposed absurdities of the New York way through childhood mimicry. Alas, wife Martha reprises her part as a vaguely-defined character sketch, though she’s a welcome almost-foil to the author when big parenting decisions must be addressed, such as the one you make upon finding the beloved goldfish, a New York kid’s pet if there ever was one, floating.

One suspects, in any case, that the real main character is the quintessential bustling metropolis itself. The essence of this “protagonist” most clearly emerges, however, through mere humans. A handful of remarks on the design, history and appearance of the city appear as well – a few previously published articles of a more journalistic nature are wedged in, none of which sit particularly well alongside the rest of the material – but it’s in the words and actions of Gopnik, his friends and his family that New York comes through. Despite slow points and hitches, Through the Children’s Gate amounts to one of the most eloquent, refined accounts of parenting and New York life in recent memory; that so many have assumed those wells dry makes the whole venture a pleasant surprise.

Mark Haddon, A Spot of Bother

Judging by the success of exported films and sitcoms, people worldwide find the lives of middle-class Britons -- even, or maybe especially, the unremarkable ones -- highly entertaining. It is upon this lucrative territory that Mark Haddon treads for his second novel, A Spot of Bother. Many readers will fondly recall 2003’s nicely done The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but as Haddon’s sophomore release is not, for one, set inside the head of an autistic savant, they’ll also spend more than a few chapters imagining what’s up the author’s sleeve. The answer, it turns out, is nothing much: the book is nearly devoid of gimmickry. What we have here is a large-cast family drama highlighted with other-side-of-the-Atlantic humor. Haddon’s style, nearly always disciplined and often impressive, stands alone between the reader and some sort of Hugh Grant film novelization.   
    It’s a tumultuous time for the family Hall. Not only has father George begun to drift into the kind of post-productivity retirement anxiety that brightens the younger generations’ outlook on a future without pensions, he’s convinced that melanoma, misdiagnosed as eczema, has stricken him. Motivated in part by George’s idle inattention, mother Jean finds herself involved with her husband’s former co-worker. Against almost everyone’s wishes, daughter Katie prepares to marry a man of -- unlike the one she divorced --insufficient refinement. Ever more anguished son Jamie grapples with the question of bringing his equally working-class boyfriend to the wedding.
    With this bunch, what you see is what you get. The Halls do not harbor unspeakable secrets, nor are they gripped by paralyzing neuroses or covered with the pulsating emotional scars currently in literary fashion. Truth be told, it’s something of a relief. They’re all relatives simply dealing with their own crises, all of which boil over, come to a resolution or both during the course of Katie’s wedding. It isn’t much of a spoiler to divulge that the wedding indeed happens and individual issues are indeed resolved; the story grinds through some equivocation, but never real doubt.
    George’s mental state constitutes the single aspect of the book that might be called unusual. Third-person narration follows a different family member in each of 144 short chapters – an effective pacing choice -- and whenever the patriarch is under the spotlight, his increasingly erratic motivations are described as coolly and reasonably as possible. When the text follows, for instance, Jamie, the very notion of his father attempting amateur surgery in the bathtub with mum’s good scissors sounds bizarre; when George decides to go through with it, his rationale reads as just about credible. Shades of Curious Incident, some may say, but it’s less of a coherent, all-encompassing condition than young Christopher Boone’s autism. At its peak, George’s confusion is the reader’s confusion; halfway in, keeping track of his impulses and their consequences tires.
    The novel as a whole loses momentum around the same point. Over the first 150 pages, Haddon’s succinct technique -- the many characters go almost entirely without physical description, for instance -- keeps pages turning rapidly and enjoyably. Then, the narrative engine coughs and sputters, generating more heat than motion. Those seeking a big payoff or vertiginous twist won’t get what they want, and they’ll still have to work hard to keep all the names straight. There is, however, a certain subtle affability to the proceedings, a hint of that quirkily English fatalism that endears so many to the country and its people.
    None of A Spot of Bother’s problems render it unreadable. (As for the straight-to-the-point depiction of George’s auto-operation, your mileage may vary.) The pleasure of the first sixty or so chapters isn’t sustained, and perhaps isn’t sustainable, but if the theme of familial bonds’ redemptive quality is enough to carry one through, perhaps that doesn’t much matter. So what if it lacks the impact of Curious Incident, or if it isn’t particularly groundbreaking? A sizable portion of the book is well-executed, and its ratio of trenchant observations per page exceeds that of most novels of the genre. Like the Halls themselves do, it may be best to settle down, pour some tea and take the good with the bad.

I heartily endorse this event or product

I at first considered Facebook, the premiere college social networking website, to sit just this side of useless. A few months after joining, I found I could use it to coordinate a screening of Ran, so I mentally pushed the thing a few feet away from useless. Now that clever users can code and distribute their own “applications,” the time has come to nudge it slightly further still. While the most popular, such as Food Fight and Family Guy Quotes, have their place, it was the book applications that won me over.

Though several are floating around, I recommend Martin Mroz and Larry Gadea’s Books. The flashier and much more popular iRead is, I suppose, the one you’re supposed to like, but I can’t put it on the same plane. Books does the stuff I want – showing what friends have read on my front-page news feed, for instance – without iRead’s dopey distractions.

So, hey, if you’re on Facebook, snag Books and friend me. A handful of bugs still crawl through the application, but that’s user-generated utilities for you. Good old Martin and Larry will have the situation handled in no time, I’m sure.

Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Historical fiction normally gazes backward, posing the big “what ifs,” asking how things might have turned out had the wind blown a little differently lo those many years ago. Because one can only trudge through so many accounts of an alternate universe’s Civil War, it’s refreshing that Janna Levin’s A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines skirts that sort of revisionism altogether. Though she’s woven a story from documented fact involving several well-known figures, the author evidently feels no need to ponder what hijinks might have ensued had logician Kurt Gödel and early computer scientist Alan Turing joined forces to form the world’s foremost alliance of superintelligence. The two never met, nor does Levin force them into a union; she takes the creative high road, drawing parallels from two experiences between which much was indirectly shared, highlighting the two misfits’ fascinating if now-familiar notions in a sometimes rough but exceedingly well-paced novel of ideas.
    That both Gödel and Turing’s theories are now well-known even to students outside the fields of mathematics, science and philosophy is a testament to the two men’s importance. Less recognized are their respective neuroses: the former entertained paranoid delusions about poisoning whose resultant food avoidance led to death by starvation, while the latter’s shaky-to-nonexistent grasp of human nature sank into isolation and, ultimately, suicide. Levin’s book reads as two biographical novels in parallel: Gödel’s presentation of his famous incompleteness theorem dominating the first half and Turing’s hand in the breaking of the German Enigma code in World War II constitutes much of the second. Both protagonists possess perhaps unsurpassed brilliance in their fields, and both have trouble coming to grips with the implications of that. As Gödel wrestles with the idea of incompleteness in the abstract and his incomplete life in the real world, Turing’s conception of the human brain as a machine, an entity without free will, overshadows his own existence.
    Narrating these lives, as the cover and the cover alone explicitly tells us, is a modern-day female scientist “obsessed” with them. Levin herself happens to be a modern-day female scientist – specifically, a theoretical cosmologist – and she details many elements of the dual histories so lovingly that one suspects the resemblance runs a bit deeper than that. Levin has clearly steeped herself in all things Turing and even more things Gödel, pausing along the way to immerse herself in things Wittgenstein; the Austrian philosopher’s work constitutes one of the precious few tangible links between the stories of the two visionaries. Gödel’s ventures into the Vienna Circle should get enthusiasts of 1930s European intellectual life salivating, just as the descriptions of Turing’s code-cracking bunker should do for cryptography nuts. Levin’s most vivid work comes deep inside the skulls of the troubled, as when following the thoughts of a bullied young Turing trapped under his boarding school’s floorboards or those of Gödel as he tries desperately to remain one step ahead of imaginary assassins.
    Like most labors of love, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines is not without its blemishes. Clumsy phrasing – men who “pin hats to their heads with hands gloved by wind-worn skin,” a “flurry of crosshatched streams that pixilated the scene” – keeps the prose from running as smoothly as it should, and some conversations sound painfully contrived, as when Vienna Circle leader Moritz Schlick nervously foreshadows to Gödel that “mathematics must be complete.” Strangely given Levin’s educational pedigree, Gödel’s discoveries about incomplete systems and Turing’s about artificial intelligence aren’t explored to a satisfactory degree: though her level of interest hints that she grasps both of them strongly, she never quite conveys it explicitly.
    The novel is nevertheless a quick, solid read, one that gives a mix of fascinating conjectures and conclusions room to roil just below the surface. Levin has, with A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, built something of a ship in a bottle. It’s crafted with the degree of care and precision requiring intense devotion, but it lacks a certain functionality. Despite the imperfections, it’s kind of beautiful, in its own way. Some would say the same about Gödel and Turing themselves.

Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Of all the injunctions given by writing teachers, “Write what you know” has perhaps the most mixed reputation. There’s a kernel of useful advice there, but the command has, unforgivably, engendered a volume of wince-inducing semi-autobiography too large to pulp all at once. Today’s young novelists face the task of proving that they’re not just narcissistically rehashing their own lives in a cynical effort to become literary darlings. With her first 514 pages – not to mention a handful of illustrations – Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl stares that particular beast, if not fully down, then at least into temporary submission.
    Protagonist Blue van Meer is a highly literate young woman; Pessl, judging by the references that pepper the text, is a highly literate young woman. Blue is driven by her professor father to what might be called extreme precocity; Pessl, as articles have revealed, lived the sort of managed activity-laden childhood you read about in articles on precocious youngsters. Over the course of the novel, Blue goes from dowdy, ostracized weirdo to gussied-up member of the in crowd; Pessl’s promotional photos bear the unmistakable once-a-geek look of the former ugly duckling. Slowly, a pattern emerges.
    Is this chronicle of Blue’s exploits merely a chronicle of Pessl’s, thinly veiled? Said exploits are outlandish enough to make that unlikely. Our heroine’s father, having permanently adopted the title of “visiting professor,” relocates every semester, which results in his daughter’s relocation every single semester. When he announces that they’ll remain in Stockton, North Carolina – the state in which Pessl grew up, but I digress –  for the entirety of Blue’s senior year, the promised respite never comes. Rather than settling into some semblance of normality, Blue falls in with a shadowy group of students brought together by an enigmatic film studies instructor and winds up solving – or thinking she’s solved, by way of an elaborate meta-conspiracy theory – a murder that spends a hefty chunk of the book plying her into obsession.
    Unlike many of the past twenty years’ attempted great American novels, the plot of Special Topics in Calamity Physics is only partially, rather than totally, overshadowed by the technique with which it’s delivered. Blue’s – or, none dare suggest, Pessl’s – zeal for all things scholastic keeps in full blast throughout the first-person narrative. Not only do citations of sources both real and imagined (“Margaret Thatcher: The Woman, The Myth”) crop up with tiring frequency, the entire novel is organized as a high school syllabus. The chapters are titled after, and, to varying extents, mirror the content of, the great works of sixth-period English: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Madame Bovary, A Room with a View, and so on, causing the reader to repeatedly flip back to check if that last chapter really was sort of like Paradise Lost.
    This is where Ms. Pessl’s lack of a track record confuses, and why Special Topics in Calamity Physics would have worked more effectively as a second novel. Are we reading the words of a finely crafted character, a social hermit who knows no other mode of expression but the demonstration of her own erudition, or those of a self-indulgent author? Answering that entails an unreasonable amount of guesswork, much like that which the narrator herself has to do to crack her mystery.
    As she reveals plot points, or as she reveals them and then reels them right back in, Pessl repeatedly pulls the rug out from under poor Blue, not to mention the reader. The pace almost grinds to a halt in the third act, where the bulk of the revelations – or maybe false revelations, but we can’t know for sure – are dumped, though, to Pessl’s credit, not as artlessly as they are in the typical embossed-cover murder mystery. Nevertheless, the boundaries between truth, fabrication and speculation blur heavily, ultimately forcing the story to the brink of a collapse under the weight of its own ambiguity. I’m willing, even so, to give the benefit of the doubt. The book might well contain an embedded message about the relativity of truth or the tendency of academics to make much ado about nothing, a work that, oddly enough, is absent from the syllabus.

Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

If his body of work is anything to go by, Haruki Murakami bears ambivalence toward a great many things: his homeland, the literary establishment, his generation, the stability of identity and the conventions of narrative structure, to name but a few. Even if he doesn’t really feel that way on a personal level, you’d be hard pressed not to get the impression after reading his new career-spanning short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, the form of which casts the author’s signature themes into sharp relief. For those who embrace Murakami’s -- and, to an extent, modern Japanese literature’s -- Spartan prose, on-and-off surrealism and oblique plotting, this book serves 24 pure helpings of the drug of choice.
    The remaining majority of the literati may be left with bewilderment-furrowed brows, but Murakami has never written to capture the mainstream. After his novel Norwegian Wood (of which this collection’s “Firefly” was a prototype) spread epidemically, the mild novelist fled Japan to escape the vagaries of notoriety. The spurning of easy acceptance runs all the way through this collection, from Murakami’s very first venture into short story composition to a cluster written, very recently, in a flurry of near-obsessive inspiration. Some pieces are reasonably clear allegories, as when a baker’s disastrous attempt to feed his newly-invented cakes to a pack of inexplicably well-regarded tasting crows parallels the tension between a young Murakami’s unorthodox work and the existing Japanese literary scene. Others stonewall with their sheer peculiarity; one wonders who on Earth could immediately unpack the symbolism of a job interview that turns out to be conducted by a stressed-out miniature bird.
    Working with a small fraction a novel’s word count, Murakami pitches his short works of fiction between slices of life and thought experiments. Like the author, the protagonists are sometimes, though not always, Japanese men born soon after the war, and they share a tendency to linger and observe their life even as it happens to them, drifting where they’re taken and reflecting upon the current moment as a distant memory. Generally, the tone and – even in translation – the language work together, to addictive effect. His writing conjures, as one character observes of his mysterious, tightrope-walking temporary lover, the presence of “some indefinable but persistent something.”
    From a critical perspective, this frustrates. Murakami’s fiction oscillates so rapidly between arid truth and wild fantasy, between sharp insight and bizarre construction that pinning it down nears impossibility. Few writers of his generation have managed to articulate the mindset of the 1960s as elegantly as when he states that “everything was simple, and direct. Cause and effect were good buddies back then; thesis and reality hugged each other like it was the most natural thing in the world. And my guess is that the sixties were the last time that’ll ever happen.” Then again, few writers of his – or, indeed, any – generation can spin almost plausible tales of talking monkeys who scurry through cities, stealing peoples’ names.
    Stephen King’s chief talent, it’s often said, is a knack for juxtaposing the mundane details of real life with vivid, harrowing descriptions of the horrific. Haruki Murakami’s talent, by the same token, is the ability to juxtapose what read like prosaic internal monologues against the shifting, dreamlike buildups they depict, with the occasional cultural – usually musical – reference inserted for grounding. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is the trophy case this skill has built, an exhibition of pure, concentrated Murakami. Though the uninitiated will likely prefer a gentler introduction along the lines of Norwegian Wood or the novel Sputnik Sweetheart, devotees will wish the book’s continuation on into infinity.

Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games

The literary establishment hasn’t given pride of place to tales of policemen and criminals, perhaps with good reason. Though high-minded forays into the underworld of shady characters who break the law – and the often shadier ones who ostensibly maintain it – do exist, countless disposable, embossed-cover thrillers regrettably crowd the shelves. After seven years and a seven-figure advance in the making, Vikram Chandra’s hefty, dense Sacred Games throws its hat into the genre ring, upping the ante significantly.
    Note that such transcendence does not entail abandonment of the cops-and-robbers story’s trusty, time-honored conventions. The haggard, divorced inspector; the corrupt institutions of law enforcement; the scrappy gang boss who rose from less than nothing; the mysterious girl who may or may not have a valuable connection to said gang boss; the shady, high-level government operatives; all make their appearances. Also in adherence to the pulp tradition, several major players possess alliterative names. Sartaj Singh, for example, is the only Sikh inspector in Mumbai, and one half of the novel follows him. The rise of Ganesh Gaitonde, one of the city’s best-known managers of organized crime, comprises the other half. Mary Mascarenas, the hairdresser sister of Gaitonde’s closest associate as well as a valuable informant of Singh’s, bridges the two men’s stories.
    From the start, Chandra puts distance between his book and its airport newsstand brethren. Early one morning, Singh receives a phone call tipping him off as to Gaitonde’s location. Recently thought to be in exile, the don was considered practically unreachable, let alone detainable. Not one to miss out on the opportunity to bring a scofflaw to justice, Singh arrives at what turns out to be a nearly featureless fortified compound. Through a speaker, Gaitonde begins to recount his life story from inside it. Even after a hired bulldozer destroys the hideout and Singh discovers the criminal mastermind’s corpse – an apparent suicide – the autobiographical talk continues. Chandra alternates between chapters covering the Sikh’s investigation into Gaitonde’s background and chapters of first-person narration of that background.
    The author’s unrolling of the stories in parallel proves effective; the book provides the reader with opportunities to identify the relevant connections before or along with the hardworking, if sometimes uninformed, hero. Naturally, he and Gaitonde, the do-gooder and the ruthless opportunist, are crafted with a handful of common qualities that emerge with each page turned: Both, for instance, are frequently overcome with feelings of isolation. Singh can never fully suppress his policeman’s instincts, relegating him to a subtly different plane of interaction than everyone else, and Gaitonde must keep perpetually aware and alert due to the shortage of room at the top of the criminal ladder and surfeit of aspirants for the spot.
    Rarely in the narrative does Chandra skimp on detail or authenticity. One of the novel’s most well-known features is its 900-page length, as well as its liberal use of slang straight from the streets of Mumbai. Though using it slows things down a bit, the back of the book helpfully provides a semi-complete glossary. While one type of reader might find it all to be a bit much, there’s another type that thrives on this kind of information overload, and they’re the ones who will feel transported to the bustling, filthy – one hopes that at least some of the squalor described was born of exaggeration – ground level of big-city India.
    Though these techniques generally work, they don’t serve a perfect story; somewhere within its final 300 pages, the plot goes slightly sour. In sharp contrast to the gritty realism of the first two-thirds of the book, events take a turn for the apocalyptically high stakes, lending an uncomfortably James Bond-ish feel. That complaint, however, is almost nitpicking. When he manages to elude the formulaic nature of thrillers – which is most of the time – Chandra makes bold, unusual choices. Even when they don’t quite click into place, Sacred Games remains an entertainingly grand experiment, one that repays the significant time investment nicely.

Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things

Though this reviewer counts himself as one of the uninitiated, Neil Gaiman is said to possess a large, devoted fan base. Cursory investigation on the internet reveals that this base is, in large part, composed of black-clad teenage girls enamored with his dark, rumpled appearance and wily British ways. That’s all well and good, but the question remains: can the man write? Many sources reply with an emphatic yes, valuing his work as fantasy without the puerile trappings to which that genre often falls victim. Fragile Things, Gaiman’s new collection of “short stories and wonders”, provides a glimpse of the writer’s appeal, but unfortunately, the scraps that have found their way into the book never cohere into anything substantial.
    Then again, perhaps that was his intention. In the compilation’s lengthy introduction, Gaiman expounds upon the origins of the project – originally intended, for example, to contain only prose; a handful of poems were added because “the book would cost you the same with or without them” – and of each story and/or wonder in particular. While sometimes useful as context, all this explication primarily communicates the following the common reader: There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of fans out there more intimately familiar with the oeuvre of Neil Gaiman than you will ever be, people who salivate over each and every one of his words. While you may be left cold by a lot of this stuff, others are already on their third read through.
    That isn’t to say that Fragile Things comprises mediocre fluff palatable solely to diehards. Several of the stories included are prestigious award-winners; the best of the bunch, a collision of the worlds of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft, received a Hugo. However, just like the images on its oddly designed cover, the pieces seem to have been inserted without rhyme or reason. Their original venues of publication range from McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales to The Matrix’s official website. A real-life ghost story here, a poem about returning to nature there, a short bit of fiction that loops infinitely in on itself after that; the unpredictability is fun at times, but it couldn’t be called an easy ride by any stretch of the imagination.
    As such, the book showcases Gaiman’s skills unevenly. At his best, he breathes life into the sorts of scenarios one might idly wonder about but not carry to their logical conclusions. What if, for example, a harlequin decamped from the world of the commedia dell’arte to our modern one? What if things could go on living, despite being eaten? What if the Bible had one last, very brief, book? These and other questions are, after a fashion, answered, and cleverly so. At his worst, Gaiman’s affectations enslave his writing. (Notably, this is an impression one gets from his more devoted followers as well.) Some pieces are spun too far from conceits too thin, as when the months of the year are personified as storytellers around a campfire or a group of gourmands tiresomely seeks an apocryphal bird.
    When myth meets reality, Gaiman’s work resonates both the most and the least. If this compilation is any indicator, what happens at the intersection of the two constitutes his staked-out territory, and the results are alternately brilliantly amusing and somewhat flat. It’s distinctly possible that this release isn’t intended for the casual Gaiman reader; that the final 54 pages constitutes a novella revisiting American Gods, an earlier novel, suggests as much. While more often entertaining than not, Fragile Things may be best left to the girls in black.

Jay McInerney, A Hedonist in the Cellar

The world of wine writing can seem a confusing tangle of high-flown descriptors and bizarre metaphors, owing in no small part to a collective case of grand mal tunnel vision afflicting field’s biggest practitioners. One viable alternative to the only sometimes penetrable work of those for whom wine is all is, unsurprisingly, the work of one for whom wine is not all, or at least not quite all. Novelist Jay McInerney, best known for the transcription of yuppie nightmares that was Bright Lights, Big City, fits the bill just about as well as anyone.
    At least the editors of House & Garden think so; McInerney has penned the publication’s wine column for years. A Hedonist in the Cellar is the second collection of these pieces, a patchwork of tastings, comparisons, conversations with luminaries of the industry and visits to famed vineyards the world over. Though many wine journalists make a show of presenting themselves as straight-shooting outsiders, McInerney actually pulls off writing like one, taking the occasional shot at those who have imbibed the Kool-Aid of pretension. “One prominent critic,” he notes, “detects ‘stones, gravel and underlying minerals’ in a 2000 Nigl Riesling.” His coda: “Gravel is stone, dude.”
    Nevertheless, hand him the right bottle and McInerney invokes the implausible with the best of them. “I’m often baffled myself,” he admits, “when I read wine notes full of huckleberries and hawthorn blossoms. But give me a glass of Amarone and I’m the man! Step back, Bob Parker!” This is not to say that he keeps cheek perpetually free of tongue. He claims that a certain Bandol rosé “can smell like old sweaty saddle leather, dry-aged beef, and even wet fur,” helpfully adding that “I mean that as a compliment.” McInerney’s excitement gets the better of his quiet dignity every so often, a condition that allows him to use the word “turbocharged” no fewer than four times. In other instances, the straight, middle-aged author comes across as something between a teenage girl and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s Ted Allen. One reaction to a fine meal and a rare champagne: “Risotto, white truffle, Salon. Oh. My. God.”
    Though all of this is informative and amusing, at no point does McInerney the wine critic emerge with as distinctive a voice as McInerney the novelist. Though there are nods to his primary career and the dubious reputation with which it has saddled him – “Ah, yes, the eighties,” he reflects. “Who can remember them?” – little else bleeds through. The short form he’s working with may be to blame: each subject receives no more than four pages, a good chunk of which is devoted to listing the relevant recommendations, which doesn’t make for smooth reading.
    A Hedonist in the Cellar’s collection is refreshingly pretension-free, at least by the low standards of wine journalism, though it’s too often stylistically undistinguished. One gets the impression that, freed of the constraints of the column, McInerney could produce something especially tasty for good-humored oenophiles with long attention spans. In the introduction, he acknowledges that wine is “an inexhaustible subject, a nexus of subjects, which leads us, if we choose to follow, into the realms of geology, botany, meteorology, history, aesthetics, and literature.” He understands that wonderful fact; next time, let’s hope he has the space to explore it.